YouBar New York Times Article PDF and Audio Commentary

The New York Times recently featured YouBar as "the little food lab fueling the big protein boom".

If you'd like to learn more about us, you can now download a PDF of our New York Times Article.

The audio version of the article also includes a commentary from the reporter, which you can find transcribed below:

"Hi, my name is Mattie Khan and I'm a contributor to the New York Times. Over the past year and a half, I've noticed that a lot of people in my world and out in the world are deeply interested in increasing their protein consumption, but there are only so many ways to cook a chicken breast. And so not wanting to consume six of those a day, the protein bar market has exploded.

I started to notice just at the checkout aisle in the supermarket, how many different kinds of protein bar options there seemed suddenly to be, and I just have this curiosity of where all this stuff comes from, where is it stored, who's producing all the protein powder that goes in these things? And it didn't take very long to figure out that even really big brands, even multinational corporations are not producing their own products, 

They are hiring factories and manufacturers who take their recipes and who churn out millions sometimes of products every week for them and send them off to stores for sale. And one of the biggest ones is this otherwise anonymous protein bar maker called YouBar. 

YouBar's headquarters is in a place called City of Industry. It's just outside of Los Angeles. I flew there in the spring to meet with Anthony Flynn, who is Youbar’s co-founder, and his brother, Dennis, who also works there, so that they could show me around their facilities, their test kitchen, and I could take a look at what's under the hood. I wanted to understand how Youbar became the leading facility in this very niche corner of the market. Everything that I learned is in the article that I'll be reading to you in a moment.

Anthony reminds me of a kind of better-for-you Willy Wonka, and I'm not the first person to come up with that.

Anthony owns a replica of Willy Wonka's purple suit. It hangs behind his desk. He takes the same attitude to protein that I think Willy Wonka as a character took to chocolate, which is how far can I push this? What are the limits of what this substance can do?

When you're walking through YouBar's facilities, there's this incredible dichotomy between the kind of boring, frankly, pretty corporate headquarters that you are seeing and the amazing inventions that are coming out of the test kitchen that's at the center of it all.

You're both in a pretty normal office and in this protein extravaganza wonderland where there isn't a form of coconut that isn't available to you to taste, where there are bags full of whey protein and pea protein isolate, and every nut butter you can possibly think of.

Because you are signs on disclosure agreements with all of its clients, we agreed not to name any of the brands whose materials I saw around the factories, but I can tell you that I saw many whose names you would know, whose products are sold at Target, at Costco, on Amazon. These are sort of the stalwart grocery aisle brands that many of us have turned to in a pinch when we've missed lunch.

I think one of the things that Youbar is grappling with is that over the past 20-something years, they've seen a lot of food trends come and go, and of course they hope dearly that protein is not another fad or trend, that this is something with staying power in the marketplace. I think they are conscious of the fact that if they want that to be true, they need to help the brands that they work with constantly innovate and come up with new delivery systems for protein, new flavors in protein consumption, because they don't want it to just be a trend, they wanted to be a lifestyle. 

One of my favorite things that Anthony said is that protein brings people together. There are all these different diets, all these different ways of eating, all of these different food preferences in the American food system, some people who are gluten-free, some people who are paleo, some people who are keto, and the one thing that people agree on is protein. I love the idea that in our very divided times, protein is the thing that Americans can all agree on."

Listen to the audio commentary here, as well as the entire article.

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